Introduction

In this tutorial I hope to provide an overview of how I created the scene and discuss a few of the key techniques I used. The main job was the texturing and so this will form the bulk of the text, however I have also touched upon some of the modeling and lighting.

The first stage before building any 3D scene is to do some research into the subject and find some reference photos. My goal in this case was to choose a topic that could take advantage of a variety of different materials and textures. I had recently seen an interesting program about Dharavi, a slum in Mumbai, and this came to mind while I was trying to think of a suitable topic. The materials used to build the many houses were varied and utilized a chaotic mixture of wood, metal and plastic.

This instantly seemed like a perfect subject and so I started to create a scene that represented the outer walls of a slum somewhere in the tropics. I liked the idea of a large wall that descended into a tipping ground for rubbish and effluence with some cramped buildings perched precariously along the edge.

Modeling & Lighting

My usual approach is to build some preliminary geometry and create the main volumes in the scene before adding a camera and experimenting with the composition and lighting. I began by creating the key components first, which in this case was the main wall and row of buildings. Each of these started life as a box which was then converted into an Editable poly and modified using simple extrusions and chamfers etc. My aim was to retain as much detail as possible for the texturing section and Fig.01 shows the main sections of geometry that make up the scene, which are little more than boxes.

Fig. 01

The photos I found of slums all seemed to incorporate metal panels that had been used to either create walls or perhaps seal the sides. These were necessary to add interest to the scene and help create an authentic appearance, along with some corrugated roofing.

Fig.02 shows a render that includes these panels and some additional structures such as the bridge and pile of rubbish beneath it. I only wanted to model the most noticeable volumes, which would be apparent from the camera angle, as the texturing was going to be used to describe much of the detail.

Fig. 02

As this was going to be a still I opted not to model the components that make up the rubbish, but instead chose to use a texture which we shall see later in the tutorial.

The metal panels along the front of the buildings were all modified from one piece and then scaled and re-positioned. I altered the outside verts to ensure each had a unique shape and then applied a Noise Modifier to create some random dents and an uneven surface. I used a similar technique for the wooden poles and bridge supports.

The two lamps hanging from the wire were derived from a lathed spline and the wire itself is simply a renderable spline.

The lighting in this render is representative of the final still and is generated form a single mr Area Spot with some bounce light created from a dome that encompasses the scene (Fig.03).

You can see, the dome here has the Self Illumination set at 100 and is used in conjunction with Final Gather.

Fig. 03

The Area Spot has been tinted slightly yellow to represent the sunlight and in order to create some softer shadows I have increased the Radius under the Area Light parameters.

(ID: 28139, pid: 0) Dahri on Sun, 28 November 2010 3:17pm its great to see in this way.
fantastic fantastic ...

(ID: 26800, pid: 0) Stephen Cooper on Mon, 08 November 2010 3:31pm Looks cool although the lighting looks abit flat across the front of the buildings.
The light effect that is making your shadows soft is also taking the strength of that shadow across the front of the buildings.
What is also making the lighting look flat is the buildings facing us seem to be at exactly the same angle. The light source you have is a very similar intensity because it lands at this similar angle.
It seems like shanty buildings would be built at slightly varying angles; and its likely the windows would also not be such uniform square shapes.
As a texturing expose its cool tho... :)

(ID: 26786, pid: 820472) Rich-3DT (Forums) on Mon, 08 November 2010 9:39am Thanks for the comments.The lack of human evidence is correct - it was my intention to put some laundry and pots etc in but didn't get round to it but it would improve the scene for sure. Was done some time ago now and can't remember exactly how long it took - I think around 3-4 days.Mountains were added in Photoshop using a few photos from the ref library.

(ID: 26653, pid: 0) AJ on Sat, 06 November 2010 6:16am Nice work as always. How were the mountains in the back done?

(ID: 26398, pid: 0) BldRnr on Thu, 04 November 2010 9:01pm Looks great, except a little sparse on the human elements eg: laundry hanging around ,plants posters etc. Would you care to comment on the time it took to put together this piece?